Individuals, businesses, and other organizations typically maintain one or more financial accounts at one or more financial institutions. Financial institutions include, for example, banks, savings and loans, credit unions, mortgage companies, lending companies, and stock brokers. A customer's financial accounts may include asset accounts (such as savings accounts, checking accounts, certificates of deposit (CDs), mutual funds, bonds, and equities) and debt accounts (such as credit card accounts, mortgage accounts, home equity loans, overdraft protection, and other types of loans).
Many financial institutions allow customers to access information regarding their accounts via the Internet or other remote connection mechanism (often referred to as “online banking”). Typically, the customer navigates, using a web browser application, to a web site maintained by the financial institution. The web site allows the customer to login by entering a user identification and an associated password. If the financial institution accepts the user identification and password, the customer is permitted to access information (e.g., account holdings and account balances) regarding the financial accounts maintained at that financial institution.
Similarly, other organizations and institutions allow customer access to other types of accounts, such as email accounts, award (or reward) accounts, online bill payment accounts, etc. A user may navigate a web site or other information source to receive status information regarding one or more of their accounts.
Certain application programs are able to extract data from web pages based on a previously defined layout of information on the web pages. For example, an account balance may be positioned in a particular location of a specific web page. The application program extracts the account balance data from that particular location to obtain a customer's current account balance. However, if the layout of the web page is modified, the previously defined layout of information on the web page is not accurate and the application program cannot properly extract the desired data from the web page.
The systems and methods described herein addresses these and other problems by providing a mechanism for updating the manner in which data is extracted from web pages when a web page layout is changed.